The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream

by Barack Obama

Still, there’s no denying that American politics in the post–World War II years was far less ideological—and the meaning of party affiliation far more amorphous—than it is today. The Democratic coalition that controlled Congress through most of those years was an amalgam of Northern liberals like Hubert Humphrey, conservative Southern Democrats like James Eastland, and whatever loyalists the big-city machines cared to elevate. What held this coalition together was the economic populism of the New Deal—a vision of fair wages and benefits, patronage and public works, and an ever-rising standard of living. Beyond that, the party cultivated a certain live-and-let-live philosophy: a philosophy anchored in acquiescence toward or active promotion of racial oppression in the South; a philosophy that depended on a broader culture in which social norms—the nature of sexuality, say, or the role of women—were largely unquestioned; a culture that did not yet possess the vocabulary to force discomfort, much less political dispute, around such issues.